Drone TV — The #1 Show in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

I guess in a sense I’m not surprised by the revelation; but that doesn’t stop me from having my stomach drop out thinking about the bad guys watching American intel operations while under way. If they have this technology in Iraq and Afghanistan, they certainly have it in Pakistan where the AQ and Talib chieftans are holed up.

Here are some of the details of the awesome WSJ story…

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Last December, U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered copies of Predator drone feeds on a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter. “There was evidence this was not a one-time deal,” this person said. The U.S. accuses Iran of providing weapons, money and training to Shiite fighters in Iraq, a charge that Tehran has long denied.

The militants use programs such as SkyGrabber, from Russian company SkySoftware. Andrew Solonikov, one of the software’s developers, said he was unaware that his software could be used to intercept drone feeds. “It was developed to intercept music, photos, video, programs and other content that other users download from the Internet — no military data or other commercial data, only free legal content,” he said by email from Russia.

This clearly falls into the “cyber vulnerability” realm, and I’ve got our boy Kevin Coleman on the case. We’ll be updating this story as details emerge, but clearly this is the opening salvo in low-cost exploitation of our most high-tech assets and should be locked up before the administration sends even more drones to Afghanistan for operational overwatch.